My Martin Amis

Editor of Cap X Alys Denby discovered Martin Amis through a boy at university would she would later go on to marry. The first book of Amis's he leant her was Success, published in 1978.

Success juxtaposes two lives set in the same era of social and economic transformation in Britain: that of well-bred Gregory Riding and his lowly foster brother Terence Service. The story is told through a two-way mirror of Riding and Services's ego-fuelled ambition. Their contrasting projections foreshadow Amis's long-term interest in male rivalries and women who enter them, often with hilarious and horrific consequences.

Alys tells Jack the story of what Success taught her about men's idea of success, how many of Amis's male readers seriously underestimate how funny women find his prose, and how times have changed such that a book like Success would likely never receive the same plaudits today as it did from papers like The Observer.

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Columnist, podcast and book reviewer for The London Times James Marriott joins Jack Aldane on Episode 5 to discuss The War Against Cliché , an anthology of Martin Amis's reviews and essays from 1971 to 2000. It was the book that changed James's approach to life, and especially writing.

James tells Jack why, despite his never having been a devotee to Amis the novelist, Amis's journalism contains by far some of the cleverest, funniest and most galvanising opinions on literature you’ll ever encounter.

The War Against Cliché remains, he says, the book which makes him want to write more than any other, and without which producing book reviews would be a whole lot less fun.

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Gender scholar, author and columnist Zoe Strimpel tells Jack Aldane about the "sexual sentimental education" she gleaned from Martin Amis’s novels as a young woman battling teenage angst.

In particular, they discuss Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, which introduced Zoe to the dark corners of male heterosexuality through Amis's burgeoning comic prose style, and how the book's portrayal of sex compares with the rules of attraction today.

Is the novel's insatiably horny hero Charles Highway now an extinct breed, or is his academic approach to sex a precursor to the modern male propensity to overthink?

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Columnist for The Financial Times Janan Ganesh, speaks to Jack Aldane about the London he grew up in during the early 90s, and which is captured in one of Martin Amis's most celebrated novels, London Fields. Janan explains why, for years, he has consistently revisited the book (of which he owns multiple copies), and how he once found himself compulsively picking it up every day to consume 50-pages in each sitting.

They discuss the characters in the 1989 novel, including those Janan believes the story could have done without, and the one he believes is the greatest literary creation to roam London since the age of Dickens.

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Author, journalist and literary editor for The Spectator, Sam Leith, tells Jack Aldane his story of meeting (and smoking with) Martin Amis, his reflections on Amis's lifelong role as "media whipping boy", and why he chose to talk about 'Dead Babies', Amis's second novel published in 1975.

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Author, award-winning columnist and Editor at Large for The New European, Matt d'Ancona, tells the show's host Jack Aldane his story of discovering Martin Amis in the heady 1980s as one of a generation of what he calls "Fukuyama's Babies".

Matt choses passages to read from Amis's memoir 'Experience', published in 2000.

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In My Martin Amis, British journalist and host of The Booking Club podcast Jack Aldane talks to writers, critics and publicists who have something personal to say about the life and legacy of the last English novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023).

Join him as they tell the story of how they discovered Amis's prose, the book that made them a fan, and what the author taught them about life and literature

Subscribe now and listen to a new episode of My Martin Amis each month, wherever you get your podcasts. Stay up to date on Twitter with @mymartinamis and find out who will be Jack's first guest.

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